Wednesday, January 17, 2018

The Widow, the Bank, and the $8 Billion Verdict

After her husband died, Jo Hopper spent eight years fighting the bank
administering the estate. She won a record-setting judgment. But will
JPMorgan Chase ever pay up?

Jo Hopper is sitting in her lawyer’s office in North Dallas, slowly,
calmly telling the story of how she believes the nation’s largest bank
tried to take away her home and her possessions, and destroy the
relationship she had with her stepchildren. Her saga began eight years
ago this month at Medical City Dallas. There, on January 25, 2010, Max
Hopper, who had been a titan of early corporate information technology, a
genius who had led the development of American Airlines’ AAdvantage
program and its SABRE reservation system, died. Max had been in good
health but suffered a stroke the day before. He was 75.

“I remember at the hospital,” Jo says, “I kept saying to the doctor,
‘What else are you going to do? You do not understand. This is Max
Hopper. He cannot die.’ I would not accept it. Even today, it is hard to
fathom.”

Spread his wings:
Max and Jo had lifetime passes to claim available seats on American
flights, but his son thought Jo might be using his Max’s AAdvantage miles.

Jo was 62 when the man she’d been married to for 28 years died. She
has spent much of the ensuing eight years locked in a legal battle over
$19 million in assets she and Max jointly owned. Her opponent:
Manhattan-based JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, with
$2.6 trillion in assets under management. Jo and her stepchildren hired
the bank to administer Max’s estate in 2010, after Max died without a
will, leaving his assets in financial limbo. But soon after JPMorgan had
collected its $230,000 fee for the estate administration, something
went horribly wrong between the bank and the beneficiaries. Lawsuits
ensued. Jo sued the bank. The bank sued Jo. Jo sued her stepchildren.
The stepchildren sued Jo. The stepchildren sued the bank. And so on.

In September of last year, a jury finally heard the case. It ruled in
favor of the family with a historic and headline-grabbing $8 billion
award against JPMorgan. That was the largest punitive award ever in
Texas. The jury’s ruling was so abnormally large that attorneys
representing the plaintiffs weren’t even sure how to calculate it—the
initial guess of $4 billion eventually gave way to the higher $8 billion
estimate.

Jo has claimed in her court filings to be a widow wronged by the
bank, but she is no frail, little old lady. In 2007, she was diagnosed
with stage 4 lymphoma and given six months to live. She has been in
remission for almost eight years and today stands steady at 5 feet 4
inches. On the day we meet, she’s wearing a flowing white top and black
pants. Silver bracelets adorn her wrists. Her gray hair is pulled back
tightly into a bun. Her attorney, Alan Loewinsohn, is here sitting
beside her. But Jo leads the conversation.

As she weaves this narrative of endless court fights, Jo hands over
pages of documents. There’s a pamphlet produced by JPMorgan called “The
Well-Prepared Family” that explains how to choose an executor. She has
highlighted the part that says an executor “is legally responsible for
preserving the value of the estate until it is distributed” and another
passage that says, “An executor is obligated to act in the best interest
of the estate’s beneficiaries.”

Next comes a printout of a job listing at JPMorgan in Dallas. They’re
hiring someone in asset management to oversee trusts and estates. “I’m
looking for a job,” Jo says. Her attorney laughs. “No, really,” says the
Nashville native, née Jo McClendon.

Finally, she hands me a paper written by a professor at Ohio State
University called “The Stepmother’s Role in a Blended Family.” Jo has
highlighted a paragraph noting that “there have been more than 900
stories written about evil or wicked stepmothers.” Cinderella and Snow
White are just two among them.

Better days: Max and Jo were married for 28 years.
The family feud between Jo Hopper and her stepchildren—61-year-old
Oklahoma City physician Stephen Hopper and Laura Hopper Wassmer, the
55-year-old mayor of Prairie Village, Kansas—is a big part of this
story. But Jo’s version is different from the bank’s. The bank has based
its legal defense on the toxic relationship between Jo and Max’s
children. It claims the family would have had no complaints about its
services had the three of them just found a way to get along. The three
heirs, in turn, allege the bank botched Max’s estate—committing fraud
and possibly a felony in the process, as well as driving a wedge between
stepmother and stepchildren.

Fraud. Felony. How did a jury come to believe that a bank that has
been part of the bedrock of the American financial system since 1871
might have done such things to a widow and her stepchildren? And what
made that jury so angry—or so concerned that what happened to the
Hoppers could happen to any of us—that it insisted on making an
unprecedented statement with its verdict? To be sure, Jo Hopper’s story
is a good one. But good enough to deserve $8 billion?

JPMorgan would never have been hired to manage Max Hopper’s estate, if Jo had her way. She would have done it herself.

All four wills that Max drafted before his death, but never signed,
said Jo should serve that role. She’d handled the family finances for
decades, and, like her husband, she’d worked as an executive at American
Airlines, once managing a staff of five systems analysts, a personal
assistant, and a multimillion-dollar budget.

Plus, the law, Jo figured, was easy to understand. When someone dies
“intestate,” as a lack of a will is called, Texas law stipulates that
the decedent’s share of the community property—anything Max and Jo owned
jointly—will go half to the surviving spouse and half to the decedent’s
children. Any property owned outside of the marriage should go
two-thirds to the children and one-third to the surviving spouse. “So
all we had to do,” Jo says, “was go through the assets, divide
everything by two and then divide again by two. Then we’re out of here.”

Max didn’t grow up to become a cowboy, but he was a maverick in his industry. Before that, he spent time in the armed services.
Stephen and Laura didn’t see it that way. In March 2010, two months
after Max died, the Hoppers met at the $2 million, 8,000-square-foot
Preston Forest home on Robledo Drive that Jo and Max had bought in 1997.
The children, as Jo calls them, even though they were both adults when
she married Max, insisted on hiring JPMorgan as an independent
administrator in part because they wanted someone impartial to handle
any disputes that might arise. “That’s what the children wanted,” Jo
says. “They wanted assurances. So I agreed.”

Days later, the family settled on JPMorgan for the job. The bank was
charged with doing what Jo had proposed to do: find all the assets, add
them up, divide by two, and divide by two again. But the Hoppers found
the process to be too slow. They say the bank didn’t act quickly enough
in executing stock options Max owned. They allege taxes were improperly
filed. And they say the bank was tardy in responding to other requests
to make financial transactions. All of that cost the children and Jo
tens of thousands or possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost
income, attorneys for both parties have claimed.

Jo and the children placed much of the blame for that on Susan Novak,
a 66-year-old JPMorgan executive who had worked on estate cases for
nearly 20 years both at JPMorgan and at Bank of America and was the
person in charge of the Hopper estate. The family painted Novak as
inexperienced, noting that she had worked on only one intestate case
before in her career. The bank has said Novak did her job flawlessly.
Novak, in court, said that although she had 25 to 30 other estate cases
to manage, she spent 70 percent of her time—about 1,800 hours per
year—working on the Hopper estate.

In many of those hours, court records indicate, she was trying not to
get involved in the mistrust between Jo and her stepchildren. To cite
just one example out of many: early on in the bank’s administration of
the estate, Stephen contacted the bank to complain that he believed his
stepmother might have been using Max’s share of American Airlines
AAdvantage miles—a share that, legally, would belong to the children.

In fact, there were no miles needed. Jo and Max were R-class flyers
on American, meaning they both had a lifetime pass to claim available
seats on flights. That was thanks to Max’s long tenure as a top
executive at the airline. The children claim that Novak never told them
about the R-class status, never cleared up the issue of potentially
missing AAdvantage miles. Without information to the contrary, the
children continued to believe—until the facts came out in court
filings—that their stepmother was taking trips using miles that belonged
to them.

(Novak retired from JPMorgan in the spring of 2017, but she
represented the bank in an official capacity during the jury trial.
JPMorgan declined to make any individuals involved in the case available
for comment for this story.)

The children allege that there were other imbalances that also put
them off. For one, the bank flew Jo to New York and sent her, gratis, to
The Phantom of the Opera, trying to woo her to open a wealth
management account. She did, and as assets were divided and released to
Jo, her share was transferred to a JPMorgan investment account. Over
time, that money accumulated to more than $4 million. The children were
never told about the New York trip. They also alleged that they weren’t
told that Jo wasn’t asked to pay any of the $230,000 fee JPMorgan
charged to administer the estate.

In January 2011, Jo says that Mike Graham, her probate attorney at
the time, sent an offer to Novak saying Jo wanted to buy all of the
personal property that had not yet been distributed by the bank. That
included Max’s collection of 6,700 putters, 900 bottles of wine, the
furnishings in her Preston Forest home, jewelry, and more. Basically,
everything except the house.

Novak replied to Graham but never notified the children of the offer,
Jo says. Two more emails from Graham followed. No counteroffers came
back. “We assumed the children had rejected the offer,” Jo says.

This pattern continued. Family members mistrusted each other. Family
members contacted the bank with various allegations. The bank didn’t
share those allegations with both sides. Mistrust festered.

By the summer of 2011, Jo’s attorneys had become so concerned with
the bank’s lack of communication that they advised her to close her
wealth management account. The $4 million she had invested with JPMorgan
promised to eventually bring a nice return to the bank. Financial
institutions typically charge a fee of just under 1 percent of the total
assets in accounts worth more than $1 million. Meaning that JPMorgan,
in less than five years, could have made more off of Jo’s wealth
management account than it would make administrating Max’s estate. (The
bank says it never collected more than $5,000 in fees from Jo’s account
in that first year.)

As soon as the account was closed, Jo says, the bank turned against
her. “The relationship became adversarial,” she says. “Suddenly, if the
children objected to something I wanted, the bank sided with the
children.”

That’s what seemed to happen when a dispute arose over Jo’s Preston
Forest house. The same summer that Jo closed her wealth management
account, she asked the bank to divide the ownership of the house evenly
between her and the children. Jo had already exercised her homestead
rights on the property, meaning that as long as she could make the
payments on the house, she would have the exclusive right to live there.
Now she wanted the home divided into equal ownership. The children,
though, wanted cash for their half—Max’s half—of the home.

Max and Jo’s $2 million, 8,000-square-foot Preston Forest home.
The way the children, and their then attorney, Gary Stolbach, figured
things, dividing ownership in a home they could not use and could not
sell so long as Jo lived there (which was her guarantee under the
homestead rules) was not a fair division of the estate. The children
wanted the property “partitioned,” meaning they would get compensated
for their half of the home and Jo would then own it outright.

There’s a lot more brain-rattling legal nuance involved from there,
but the important thing to know is that this “partition” was a novel
legal theory Stolbach had floated. Jo says such a thing had never been
done before to a widow or widower in Texas, and the bank had no
obligation to go along with it. JPMorgan, in fact, had the right to
simply declare the home equally divided, which is what Jo wanted and
what the bank also initially said it wanted.

“The bank was appointed as the independent administrator,” says James
Bell of James S. Bell PC in Dallas, who represented the children during
the jury trial but is no longer an attorney on the case. “In an
independent administration, it means the bank can do whatever, whenever,
however it wants to do. It can split the assets how it wants as long as
it is not violating the statutory guidelines. And for over a year the
bank could have divided that house how they saw fit in accordance with
the law. But they just didn’t do it until there was litigation.”

The litigation was initiated by Jo. She filed a lawsuit against both
the children and the bank in late September 2011. From the children, she
sought a court declaration that a partition was not legal. From the
bank, she sought a declaration that the bank had breached its contract
with her, that it had committed fraud and breach of fiduciary duty by
misrepresenting its expertise in handling cases like hers and by failing
to properly communicate with her and the children. Further, she sought
the bank’s removal as independent administrator.

The Collector:Max and Jo’s home held Max’s collection of 900 bottles of wine and 6,700 putters, which Jo tried to buy from the estate.
After it was sued, the bank asked the probate court to declare that
it had the right to do what the children had asked, even though it had
previously told Stephen and Laura that it preferred to do what Jo
wanted—divide ownership equally. From there, JPMorgan doubled down. The
bank also asked the court to affirm that it not only could “partition”
the house—forcing Jo to compensate the children for their one-half
interest in the house—but it could force Jo to sell her house to a third
party, at a price she could not negotiate.

The bank acknowledged that because Jo had exercised her homestead
rights, it could not kick her out of the house. But it maintained that
it still had the right to make her a tenant in her home, which someone
else might own. The bank further said that it had the right to take back
some of the assets it had already distributed to Jo and make her use
those assets to buy out the children’s interest in the Robledo home.

Here’s how the $8 billion jury seems to have heard those facts: the
largest bank in America told a court that it would consider forcing the
sale of a widow’s home over the widow’s objections.

There’s a book on the table beside her—Johanson’s Texas Estates Code
Annotated. It’s a 1,661-page reference book on probate law in Texas that
Jo bought in 2011. That year she spent Thanksgiving reading it. All of
it. Every page.

Jo picks up the bulky book with one hand and flips it open to a page
she has marked. It shows the probate code’s stance against partitioning a
home after the death of a spouse. “It’s right here. It’s the law,” she
says. “The bank knew that. But the bank was bullying me, trying to
emotionally break me. This tactic was unbelievable and unprecedented as
far as I could find. They were going to sell a widow’s home.”

Initially, the bank’s stance was upheld, in part, by the probate
court. But eventually, the probate court modified its ruling, and the
litigation over the house concluded in two ways. In June 2012, the bank
decided to divide the house ownership in equal interests, as Jo had
wanted all along. Then, on December 3, 2014, the three justices who
preside over the Eighth District Court of Appeals issued a 26-page
ruling that chided the earlier probate court and declared the novel
partition theory unlawful. Jo had her house; the children had half a
mortgage.

JPMorgan is not wrong about the family’s blood feud. The bank says it
tried to get the sides to come to terms before the issues about the
house ended up in court. “We continually urged the family to reach an
agreement on the division of the home and personal property,” says Greg
Hassell, a spokesman for JPMorgan. The children declined to comment on
specific questions regarding their stepmother. But attorneys who have
represented both Jo and the children say neither side is speaking to the
other, except through their lawyers. That might have something to do
with a handful of nasty court filings that came out after Jo sued
JPMorgan and the children in September 2011.

In one such filing, from 2016, the children said that they “have been
antagonistic to Mrs. Hopper (personally, legally, or in both contexts)
for nearly six years. Beginning with Max Hopper’s sudden death in 2010,
distrust marred the relationship between the Heirs and Mrs. Hopper. This
uneasy relationship is precisely what prompted the Heirs to insist Max
Hopper’s estate be administered by a neutral, independent third party.
That is what the Heirs believed the Bank to be when they engaged its
services as independent administrator in 2010.”

In another filing, from 2014, Jo’s attorneys compiled a long list of
things that they wanted to be sure would never be mentioned in front of
jurors. Those included:

Jo’s “decision to pay for or not pay for any college related
expenses, including tuition, for any grandchild of Max Hopper”; why Jo
“did not sit on the front row of Laura Wassmer’s wedding in 1987”; that,
when a “document production” on Jo’s behalf in this case was held in a
garage in 2012 “it was cold outside, and/or the house was locked so if
anyone needed to use the restroom, they had to go down the street to a
public restroom”; “Any suggestion that Jo Hopper had any type of
romantic relationship with Max Hopper prior to his divorce”; and any
“reference to a book entitled How to Marry a Millionaire.”

Jo insists the bank exacerbated that infighting. “I’ll admit,” she
says, “there was a crack in our relationship. Anybody who goes through
the loss of a father with a stepmother, you’re going to have a crack.
But what JPMorgan did was they took that crack and they made it into the
Grand Canyon.” But since JPMorgan officials have said in court that the
family dynamic was toxic and unsalvageable, and since both Jo and the
children sued to have the bank removed as independent administrator, one
wonders why the bank didn’t just resign.

The answer to that question, say attorneys for the children, ends with two words: “theft” and “felony.”

“That is the key question you have to ask yourself here,” says Bell,
the attorney who represented the children during the jury trial. “Why
did the bank not step down as the independent administrator? The reason
is if they stepped down, there was a lawsuit naming them, so they would
have had to pay the legal fees for that lawsuit out of their own pocket.
But if they stayed in the case, they had a war chest to defend
themselves with. And the war chest they had just so happened to be an
account with my clients’ money in it.”

Independent administrators are allowed to hire attorneys and pay
legal fees using assets of an estate so long as they are using those
lawyers and fees to represent the interests of the estate. And when Jo
sued the bank and the children in 2011, the bank decided to cover the
legal costs of defending itself by withdrawing money from an estate
account that had nearly $4 million in it. The children claim that money
belonged entirely to them.

When the children in turn sued the bank, the bank used that same war
chest—the money that would have gone to the children—to fight their
claims.

Once
the children discovered the estate’s money was being used to pay the
bank’s lawyers in the legal fight, they asked for the bank to stop using
the account. JPMorgan did not comply. Eventually, the account was
drained of all but $100, just enough to keep the account open. Then
JPMorgan made its own novel legal move. The estate, as administered by
the bank, took out a loan, from JPMorgan, for more than $900,000. The
bank, in other words, loaned itself money, indebting the estate in the
process.

That was only revealed during the trial when Bell cross-examined the
lead attorney for Hunton & Williams, which JPMorgan had retained.
Just before closing arguments in the jury trial, JPMorgan decided to
forgive the estate that loan amount and pay the $900,000-plus out of its
own pocket. But it did not reimburse the estate for the nearly $4
million it had already spent on legal fees.

The
six jurors found that JPMorgan had committed something called
“conversion” when it took money out of the estate’s account to pay
attorney’s fees against the will of the children. “Conversion” is a term
of art that means taking something that doesn’t belong to you and
exercising control over it even when the rightful owner demands that the
something be returned to their control.

“Fiduciaries are entitled to hire counsel,” says Russell Fishkind, a
partner with Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr in New York and the author
of Probate Wars of the Rich & Famous: An Insider’s Guide to Estate Planning and Probate Litigation.
“So long as the fiduciary’s goal is to further the interest of the
estate and enhance the purpose of the estate, and their fees are
reasonable, courts will typically allow the fiduciary to hire counsel
and for the counsel fees to come out of the estate.

“The question in this case was, ‘Is that what JPMorgan was doing?’
Clearly the jury thought not. It thought the company was working in its
own interests, not in the interests of the estate.”

The children’s attorneys, in an October filing with the probate
court, also now say that the conversion they’ve alleged in this case
qualifies as theft under the Texas Penal Code. They contend that the
theft is a first-degree felony because the value of the property stolen
is more than $300,000.

If the court agrees with the children’s attorneys, then the state’s
caps on punitive damages—Texas generally limits such damages to two
times the amount of actual economic damages—may no longer apply.
JPMorgan could face a significant payout to the children and maybe to Jo
as well.

Tom Fee, a partner with Dallas-based Fee, Smith, Sharp & Vitullo,
told me by phone in early October, “We think we can bust the punitive
damage caps in Texas. There is a provision that says if you’re a
financial institution and you basically commit a crime, the caps don’t
apply.”

Still, Fee and his partner Lenny Vitullo, who was on the trial team
for the children, haven’t asked the court to uphold the jury’s huge
award—whatever that award might be. Initially, the firm said Jo had been
granted $2 billion and their clients had been granted $4 billion by the
jury. It even issued press releases to that effect. But, looking more
closely at the jurors’ paperwork, it became clear that the jurors had
gone further. The six-person panel found that JPMorgan had made
malicious breaches in its fiduciary duty to the estate—meaning Stephen
and Laura collectively. It awarded the estate $2 billion for that. The
jury also found that JPMorgan had committed fraud, for which it gave $1
billion each to Stephen and to Laura. It also awarded the same $1
billion amount to each of the children for negligence on the part of
JPMorgan. That’s $6 billion total for the children and $2 billion for
Jo.

The bank has suggested the jury award is out of line and will not
stand up to judicial review. But, even though Fee believes the award is
something more than jackpot justice from a runaway jury, they won’t ask
the probate judge reviewing the jury award to uphold the unprecedented
award. Instead, they’ve asked for about $75 million, or nine times the
actual economic damages they say the children have suffered. “We realize
we’re not going to collect the $2 billion,” Fee told me just two weeks
before Stephen and Laura asked their attorneys to stop speaking with the
media. “So we’re seeking the maximum that the law does allow us to
recover. For our clients, this is about more than money. Our clients
really wish Chase would take some responsibility here. So we want to
back up the jury, back up those citizens who gave their time and
attention to this. And to protect other consumers, we believe we need to
make this stick.”

The jury verdict in the hopper case came after midnight on September
27. The jurors had deliberated for four hours. As soon as they were
done, they sought out Jo, Stephen, Laura, and their attorneys. “They
said they felt bad about what Jo had been through,” says Loewinsohn,
Jo’s attorney. “One of them told me, ‘If the bank didn’t care about Jo
Hopper and the money she had, why would they care about us when we don’t
have that kind of money?’ ”

The jurors said the same thing to Stephen and Laura, who agreed to
answer a few of my questions jointly, by email. “In talking with several
of the jury members after the trial, they commented that they felt we
had been bullied by JPMorgan, and that they awarded the huge verdict
because they didn’t want other families to go through what we have had
to go through,” the children wrote. “They were hoping that the verdict
would change the way JPMorgan conducted business.”

Funny thing about that: on the trading day immediately following the
early morning jury verdict, JPMorgan Chase stock opened at $93.70 per
share and closed up, at $95.18. Either Wall Street figured a company
with 243,000 employees and a net income of $24.7 billion could survive
an $8 billion payout, or the verdict hadn’t registered at all with
investors.

Still, the verdict did generate some bad publicity for the bank. On The Motley Fool Podcast,
for instance, co-hosts Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp bantered
about it. “Anyone who reads about this case will be told it’s going to
get knocked down in appeals,” Brokamp said. “They’re not going to get $4
billion to $8 billion. The lesson, here, is to get an estate plan. But
if you don’t have one, hire JPMorgan. They’ll do a horrible job—”

“And,” Southwick said, “You get your payday.”

That remains to be seen. The probate court will have more hearings on
the case early this month, but a final ruling on the historic jury
award is likely months, if not years, away. The stepmother that neither
Stephen and Laura are speaking to, the stepmother who is no longer in
touch with her grandchildren because of this case, she will have to
wait. “We fought,” Jo Hopper says. “But we haven’t effected change. Not
yet.”

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